


come my way and stay

by Anonymous



Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hadestown Fusion, Bees, Cannibalism, Gen, ambiguous tragedy, mild meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-13 20:15:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29407506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: A story isn’t a story until it has been told again. Before that, it’s just a dream.Or: This is a thrice-told tale. Let's sing it again.
Relationships: Thomas Sanders & The Sides
Comments: 7
Kudos: 14
Collections: Anonymous, Thomas Fucking Dies





	come my way and stay

**Author's Note:**

  * For [arealsword](https://archiveofourown.org/users/arealsword/gifts).
  * Inspired by [melliferous](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26674225) by [arealsword](https://archiveofourown.org/users/arealsword/pseuds/arealsword). 



> happy tooth extraction, min!!! it's a bit late, but. you know?
> 
> everyone who isn't min: many, many months ago, when melliferous was still incomplete, i thought it was going to end in a way that it didn't. later, i discovered what a 'remix' is, and i decided that i would remix the hell out of melliferous. even later, other people got there first, and finally gave me the words and songs i needed to re the hell out of this mix. houserofstories; lostyk - this goes out to you too
> 
> (mic drop)  
> (mic pick back up)
> 
> content warnings are pretty much the same as melliferous. but, like, the cannibalism thing? yeah. it's not 'lightly implied' anymore. it has had remus thoroughly applied. also, the title is from 'sirens' by the mechanisms, who influenced this story... not as much as ghost quartet did

A story isn’t a story until it has been told again. Before that, it’s just a dream.

Some stories live over and over again, though, far more than they were meant to. Trapped in endless loops of love and life and loss and looking back, again, in the hopes that something will be different. Sometimes, things in these stories are the same. Sometimes, they are not.

All stories are happy if you end them at the right point. All endings are sad, for those who care to feel sad.

Stories are stories, and this story’s path has been trodden an uncountable number of times. Sometimes, the names are new. Oftentimes, they are not.

This story, with these names, is a thrice-told tale, of the man lying with a cross at his feet, embraced by people who aren’t there – who aren’t people; who died without dying. It doesn’t always end like that, but it usually does. Whether anyone cares is a matter of perspective and interpretation.

Most things are that way.

So, once again, let us let this story rise, shambling, from the darkness of the underworld. Let it claw up the ladder, crawling like spiders on silk, and peer out through a manhole cover in Florida, USA.

For the fourth time in as many stories, somewhere in a Floridian woodland, a man called Thomas Sanders is bitten by a snake. This often kills him.

This time is no different.

His Sides – the extrapolations of his own thought processes, given words and minds and bodies of their own – hold a memorial service. They’ve laid flowers on his still chest, and laid a little cross made of twigs at his feet. Unfortunately, it turns out that standing around and talking to yourself doesn’t work as well when the whole sum of the parts lies dead in the front-centre of their little semicircle.

Sharing stories isn’t very easy when you’ve heard them all before.

Janus watches as a snake slithers away into the underbrush. It must have been afraid. That’s what makes snakes bite, after all. They don’t have the capacity for purposeful, personal malice. They’re just creatures with the single-minded focus of living as good a life as they can get. Anything that gets in the way, causing fear or distress or discomfort, must be eliminated.

There was no real reason for the snake to be afraid; no reason for it to try to protect itself against good, innocent Thomas. Sometimes, bad things happen without any meaning behind them.

It’s unrealistic, but aren’t all stories?

“It’s not going to end like this,” Janus announces, inadvertently creating an excellent moment for a darkly comedic ending.

“Well, obviously it isn’t, because we’re still around,” Roman counters the narration, unintentionally. “It’d just be shoddy storytelling, setting up characters and a dilemma and then ending it immediately. But how the Tony Hawks’s Pro Skateboard-flipping _hell_ are we going to do that?”

Janus smiles. For a Side with half a snake-face, he looks oddly like the cat who got the cream. “I’m glad that you brought up Hell, Roman, because that’s exactly where we’ll be going.”

* * *

Of course, Hell isn’t real.

The Underworld is, though, and it’s filed neatly under ‘U’ in the Yellow Pages. _No silver, no soul, no service_ , the listing says, and Remus grins.

“Think of all the other s’s they’re allowing a lack of with that!” he laughs. “No shoes, no shirt, no skin, no shit!”

Janus thanks Remus for his very worthwhile statement that they have absolutely never heard before.

Then Patton wants to say something, and Logan, with his pedantic personality and constant conviction of his own correctness, finds himself having to respond with: “You’re not proposing that we take a corpse on a five-hour cross-state walk, are you?”

He asks that with a tone indicating that, yes, he fully believes that that is what Patton is suggesting, and he has deemed it to be an absolutely moronic idea. He is right on both counts, but they don’t know that yet.

“It’s not a bad idea,” Roman muses. “We don’t know how all this works, really. It could be that we’ll need his body in order for it to be mystically resurrected.”

Virgil hums. “It’d really suck if we got all the way to the Underworld, only to find out that we’re missing a key part to getting Thomas back.”

And, well, corpse-hauling has always been a (not-so-)secret passion of Remus’s, and he’s already eaten the flowers (another not-so-secret passion, but no other narrator really ever mentions that), so that’s what they do.

It turns out that, in America, it’s totally fine to walk along the road with five other identical people while lugging the corpse of _another_ identical person, as long as you’re white.

* * *

Does this story seem familiar? Do you already know that the entrance to the Underworld is a manhole cover, marked with an ‘H’ for _‘Hell’_ , or _‘help’_ , or _‘Hades’s Town’_? Do you remember how the ferryman waved his hand uncaringly as Thomas’s body became worms? Have you already heard the bees buzz, and how their electrical humming drowned out the whispers and warnings?

You should know this already. Even if the words change, it’s still been the same story. There was a bee hovering near Thomas’s corpse, searching for nectar. If you’ve heard this story before, you would have known that. It’s important, but it’s important in the way that Arachne, spiders crawling over every inch of both sides of her skin, gifts the six travelling Sides with a length of silk. It’s important like the bioluminescent fungus that lines every wall. All in all, that is to say that it matters very much, and many things would be different without such an occurrence, but only if you care to note it.

Stories don’t always make sense, after all. The quieter sounds fade first from the echo.

It’s important in the way that they’re told to not eat a bite or drink a drop of anything down there in the Underworld, no matter how enticing. Really, though, that’s just common sense. If they’d remembered, they would have packed a lunch or seven.

It won’t matter yet. The river they cross with the ferryman’s aid is full of maggots. The body that was once Thomas’s has dissolved and decayed into worms that flee like frightened snakes. No matter how much all the Sides enjoy _The Lion King_ , Remus is the only one who wants to eat bugs, and he’s displaying a truly commendable amount of self-restraint at the moment.

The honey gleams red in the mineshaft of a hive. It’s heavy in the air; sickly sweet in the way that treacle treats and giant candy canes are. It’d make your stomach churn, if you were there, walking amongst the tessellating honeycomb, surrounded by bees the size of pomegranates. It’d make your teeth hurt, and your stomach ache, but your mouth would nevertheless be watering. It’d settle on your tongue and in your lungs; thick like the buzzing bees’ fuzz, and as bitingly harsh as their obsidian carapaces.

It is warm in there, I think. I think it’s like being stuffed into an overfilled train carriage during rush hour, where all the bodies are sweaty and stinky and you’re so certain that you’re going to suffocate in there. Why is it warm? Isn’t death supposed to be cold?

Thomas’s Sides do not stop walking forwards, holding each other’s hands as if to reassure themselves that they are not alone. Their arms twist awkwardly as they force themselves to go single-file through the narrower parts of the tunnel. There is no reason for them to look back when they have the reassurance of physical contact. If they’d remembered this before, they might have already left, together, and enjoyed a happier story.

The bees of the hive watch everything, anyway, through faceted onyx eyes. How do they make their scarlet honey? Logan recalls that, to his knowledge, such a thing is only found in the Himalayas. ‘Mad honey’, it’s sometimes called, due to an oft-hallucinogenic chemical found in the rhododendrons that the bees get their pollen from. Perhaps they feed on the same flowers.

People always say that the light at the end of the tunnel is a good thing. Those people have never been to the Underworld, where the sun shines like yellow houselights, and the surrounding town feels just as real as a painted backdrop from a long-forgotten play.

Still, Thomas’s Sides do not stop walking forwards. Their hands hang loosely by their sides.

“Where are the flowers?” Patton asks.

He is right to question it. In Grecian mythology, the rivers are lined with flowers. Poppies, for forgetfulness. Poppies, for remembrance. Poppies, which thrive when they are planted in flesh and watered with blood.

The banks of the maggoty river were barren. It’s the same here. No gardens; no potted plants; no flowers. Not a single weed pokes through the inhumanly clean street. There wouldn’t be the space; not with the crowds of people shambling about unseeingly, bumping into each other like the clumsy bees that fly above.

“Perhaps they go outside to gather pollen,” says Roman, who knows, deep down, that he’s wrong.

“There might be flowers further in,” says Janus, who doesn’t know that he’s right.

You should already know where the honey comes from, though. This is, after all, a thrice-told story.

“Maybe they eat dead people,” says Remus, who is completely correct. Maybe he forgot to forget. Maybe it’s a wild guess from the broken clock, right twice a day.

It’s probably because he watches, face gaping in an ahegao-esque kind of joy, as a bee lands on the face of one of those shuffling shades and forces its jaw open. The bee pokes its tongue out far further than it should be able to, and licks down the shade’s mouth. The skin of its throat bulges under the bee’s tongue, like some grotesque attempt to mime swallowing in a body no longer capable of it, until it seems that all the nutrients are gone from that part of the body, so the bee moves its tongue deeper in; deeper in until it has eaten its fill.

The leftover body drops to the ground. It doesn’t seem to have minded what has happened to it. It probably didn’t even notice.

Take a moment to consider the thing that matters most in your life. How much do you love it? How _do_ you love it? Like how crops love rain? Like how meat loves salt? Like how death loves life, and life loves death, and how they still hate each other, because death _is_ life and love _is_ hate and, no matter how you rearrange it, it’s always still true?

The Sides are Thomas. Thomas is the Sides. They are not meant to be apart; they are not meant to be split across the meaningless binary of living and dead.

Remus bites his lip. For a moment, the featureless shade seems to have brown hair, and a long chin, and a slightly angular nose.

For a moment, Virgil supposes that he could see Thomas, honey dripping from his slackened mouth.

For a moment, Roman considers the possibility of never seeing the stage-lights illuminating the look in Thomas’s eye as he gets ready for the curtain call.

Patton imagines Thomas, alone. Janus imagines Thomas in a fate that he’d call _‘worse than death’_ if to do so wasn’t so on-the-nose.

For the first time, Logan wonders if they made a mistake in bringing all that remained of Thomas’s consciousness into this afterlife, just as he has done many times before.

You should know that Hell is not made of endless suburbs, surprisingly. There’s a big manor, and a little cabin, and a bar where the dead can drink fresh air, and sunlight, and the memory of rain in July, and all the other things that they don’t know anymore.

United in their desire to find Thomas in the sea of featureless bodies, the Sides split up.

“It’s not safe,” Virgil says, talking about horror movies, and Scooby Doo, and scary stories on the internet that make you fear your own isolation. “There’s no guarantee we’ll find each other. What if we lose Logan? We can’t lose Logan. Logan’s the one with critical thinking skills!”

“What if we lose Thomas?” asks Janus. “What if we all stay together while we search, and we find him, and the bees have already consumed him?”

“Since I tend to have to corral you all like a group of elementary school students, may I suggest using the buddy system?” Logan does not ask.

It works, and hands are grabbed once again, until everyone has someone by their side, and each pair takes a different path; the same ones they always take.

Roman and Patton – to the houses on the long, long streets of the town.

Virgil and Remus – to the little cabin atop a very big hill.

And, finally, Logan and Janus – to the flowers.

* * *

You should be familiar with Seph by now.

She drops the letters from her name when they become too much to carry, just like how she pours a drink into an empty glass when someone’s much too sad for her loving heart to bear. She hauls bodies – rather pliable and limp, for stiffs – onto whatever space she can find for them, and gives them a little something to make their afterlife a little less… Whatever it is.

This is not a kind place, this underworld. This hell. Her wife’s little fucked-up farm, really, is what it is. It was meant to be different. The flowers would feed the bees, and the bees would spread the flowers through the Underworld. The dead would rest for as long as they needed, before forgetting, and living once more.

She misses her mother. She misses her friends. She misses Hermes, whenever she reaches one home or the other.

She always misses _her_. She misses the home they dream of, curled up on Hades’s narrow bed, jammed between jars and jars of honey. Misses all the dust it gathers; misses the pathway they’d built to it; misses the pathway they barely tread. They oiled the gates, but they still haven’t torn down the fences.

They’re just both very caught up in other things. Other things, like fluttering souls with no place to rest; caught between life and death like a fraying rope being pulled in two directions.

Seph has a loving heart, though – I mentioned it earlier – and those things just make her sad, so she mixes up happiness from bottles she’s smuggled down, and brews love like moonshine in the back of her bar.

It’s the honey, mostly, in the drinks she makes. There’s always so much honey, and nobody ever really tries to eat it. Nobody really notices when she takes a jar or thirty, and nobody really cares when she mixes it all up with the way the stars twinkle, or the smell of peonies and petunias when they finally bloom. There’s nobody to balk at the idea of serving human remains to… Well, how can she put this? Serving human remains to human remains. Everything’s made out of the same things, deep down. It just so happens that the shades and the honey are just a bit more same-thing than most other things.

Nobody’s there to balk until two Sides walk into her bar, where music hums like the end of a record, and where nothing ever changes. She’s seen it all before, of course.

You have, too.

“Well, hello, there,” she slurs, in her jaunty, Southern style. “I’d offer y’all some Autumn Breeze, but something tells me you wouldn’t accept.”

“Well, we have been warned against it,” Patton replies, pressing his index fingers together by the tips. He’s the very picture of innocent politeness, and the worst part is that he’s completely sincere.

Still, Roman’s looking behind her, at the glinting bottles of adoration and glory, and the little flask she keeps to hold the human ideal of what it is to be a god. He’ll probably think himself slick, when he slides a bottle of plain honey up his sleeve when he goes, but he really isn’t. He’s part of the closest thing to a human down here. He’s clumsy, because that’s how humans are.

It’s okay. It’s endearing, really.

“We’re looking for Thomas,” says Roman. “He’s us.”

Seph hums. “You’re his dreams, ain’t’cha?”

“Amongst other things,” he replies, probably missing the point.

She tells them all she’s ever known, or as close to it as she can get. They help her feed the dead, and she helps them in the only way they can really be helped.

“There ain’t no getting out, not when you’re dead,” she says. “Dead is dead. And I’m afraid your Thomas is far past that point now.”

Roman wipes away a dribble of slick, sticky honey from a shade’s mouth. A second later, his lips contort in disgust, and he proceeds to wipe his thumb on the shade’s vague clothes. “But that doesn’t make sense. If ‘dead is dead’, that means all six of us should’ve died with Thomas. We’re not dead, so how can Thomas be?”

With a shrug, Seph answers, “Beats me. But let me tell you – you saw his body, right? Saw what was left behind?”

“We carried it all the way to the ferryman,” says Roman.

She raises her eyebrows at that.

“It’s not like it was my idea!” Roman protests.

“Sure it wasn’t,” she replies, leaning her elbows on the bar.

Patton and Roman bustle through the tables, replacing empty glasses with full ones, and helping the spirits lift their drinks to their open mouths, and imagining the future they were going to have with Thomas, before he died. It kills the living to be down here, Seph knows this from experience. At least the stiffs end up running out of juice, eventually. The living aren’t nearly as lucky.

After a while, she sighs, turns away from her shame, and gestures for them to sit.

“A’ight, I know you’ll keep doing this no matter what,” she says. “My wife, she ain’t nice. Plead at her feet, and she’ll kick you in the face. You’d have a better chance at turning back time than turning her heart.”

“I think you should get a divorce,” Patton says. “She doesn’t sound like a nice person.”

“Niceness ain’t got nothing to do with it.” Seph pats the pomegranate flower pinned to the breast of her suit jacket. “I love her, and that’s that.”

Neither of them look convinced.

“What I’m trying to say, again, is that you can’t go and ask her nicely. You might sing nice, but even Orpheus couldn’t pull her heartstrings now. Nah, you go try sneak him out real quiet,” she tells them, “and maybe it won’t matter if you look back or not.”

* * *

Missus Hades was never nice. Fair, once, yes; and maybe once again.

Still, ‘fair’ and ‘nice’ are very different concepts that only occasionally align, and Missus Hades could not afford a moment’s nicety. If she ever did, the cycle of nature could collapse in on itself, in fact, in a series of _‘what if’_ s and _‘why not this’_ es and _‘it worked like that for them’_ s.

When you’re dead, you’re dead. There’s no going back. You’re meat; fresh nutrients for the soil and the beasts and the bees, and that’s a good thing. It really is. If nobody died, nothing would change.

Missus Hades hasn’t died, and here she is, after all these years: in her little cabin on the hill, spooning honey into jars that she stacks upon each other until she can’t remember how big the room was meant to be, or what colour the walls were. Just rooms surrounded in glistening red, sparkling like polished ruby columns. Underneath the floorboards, deeper in the hill, she thinks that the hive might have expanded, or maybe it’s shrunk. It’s always very much the same for her, as Queen and beekeeper and butcher, but being a wife – a proper wife, this time, who honours her spouse with every breath – is her favourite and most recent job.

There are three deadlocks on her cabin door. She hasn’t used them in a while. It’s alright; the door creaks loudly enough to let her know when the two men who are not people – who are not alive or dead, and who therefore lie outside of her jurisdiction – have invited themselves inside again.

She doesn’t bother to greet them at the entrance. There isn’t much in her home for them to nose into, save for the jars of honey, and they already know it would be unwise to eat that.

It won’t stop them, of course. She’s already carving up the meat she always serves to them. The rest of it, the leftover gristle and bone, gets thrown down into the main hive, down in the basement, where the biggest bees hum like old heating pipes. By now, she knows how to time the heating of the pan; the dipping of the spoon; the thin drizzling of honey – just enough that they can blame the flavour of the meat on it – so that the steaks are plated and ready for the not-living-not-dead to eat when they arrive.

It’s worth it to see their faces when they arrive in the kitchen. The one with a moustache looks delighted, while the other’s shoulders tense and his eyes flicker around in their sockets, as though searching for somewhere to flee to.

The one with a moustache keeps staring at the plated steak. Drool drips from his mouth like honey. She’s always suspected that he knows what the steak is made of, while the other, licking his lips and trying to fight the insatiable urge to _look_ at the perfectly-cooked meat, does his best not to think about it.

“Eat up, if you want,” she tells them, guiding them to their places at her dining table. She even manages to get the moustachioed one on a chair, this time. “I always offer hospitality to my guests.”

“Thanks, but we’ve been warned enough times against eating the food down here,” says the other one. He shifts in his seat. It’s started to squeak again. She’ll need to fix it soon.

Hades doesn’t bother to remember their names. She’ll pick them up the next time they come around, when they’re whining each other’s names like they haven’t learnt to keep important things like that locked away, anyway.

“Also, is that honey oozing from that steak?” asks the one with the moustache. “Like, the dead-people honey?”

“It is,” Hades replies. When they remain silent, she continues, “It can make people do incredible things. Just a drop could make a mute sing beautifully enough to bring the opera hall to tears. It could make a poet write the next Iliad in a night; could make the tired run; the starving full. Delivered before the last breath passes the lips and the heart stops beating, it could bring the dying back to full health.”

“Do the dead drink it, here?” the other one asks.

She smiles wryly. “Yes, they do. It’s a bit of a waste, really, since it only ever gives them oblivion. My wife always acts like she’s slipping it out on the sly, but I don’t really mind. I always meant to export it, anyway.”

The other one glances around the room again, but more slowly, letting his eyes rest on the way the golden light refracts through the translucent honey. “Doesn’t look like you’ve been doing much exporting.”

“It’s a work in progress,” Hades replies. “Unfortunately, there have been some persistent interlopers troubling us for quite some time.”

“Yeah, I bet that sucks!” says the one with the moustache. “But, I mean, we don’t give a shit about the honey. Like, as a collective. I give a shit about the honey. It’s made out of people insides! I really, _really_ want to try it.”

“Feel free,” she says, once again gesturing towards the steak. “It’s never as nice cold, so make your choice quick. Or go. It won’t matter, anyway.”

She makes to walk away, gathering her skirts, when the other one stands up. “Wait! We needed to ask you about something.”

“Something else?” She raises an eyebrow, but the other one, with his shadowed eyes scrunched up in determination, does not flinch.

Good.

“We need to talk to you about getting our Centre back,” he says, unwavering. “He’s called Thomas. He got bit by a rattlesnake, but, seeing as we’re not dead, it doesn’t make sense for him to be.”

“Dead is dead,” she shrugs.

“But, semantically, parts of him are still alive. Me, Remus, the others… It doesn’t make sense for him to be dead when we’re not.”

Ah, she remembers. The one with the moustache is called Remus.

“Semantically, you’re not alive,” says Hades. “Just bits of consciousness left behind.”

“In the world of the living. We belong to the world of the living, and we’re Thomas, so that means Thomas belongs there.”

It’s a lovely idea. If only they could ever follow through with it.

“Eat your steak,” she tells them, “or don’t. It really doesn’t matter. Meat is meat. Don’t bother cleaning up; just leave when you’re done.”

And so she steps out of the room, just far enough to give them the illusion of privacy.

She always pauses to listen to them. They always say the same thing.

“Funny how it doesn’t feel like much of a choice at all, huh?”

“Yeah. Real funny.”

And then they stop speaking, filling the silence with the grating screech of sharp knives on ceramic plates, and Missus Hades walks away, towards the third chapter of the story.

But we do not. We remain, leaving the brief constraint of a singular perspective, until the scene comes to a close, and it’ll happen – it will, I promise – as soon as Remus says:

“Oh, this is _gourmet_ Soylent Green!”

* * *

Far away, in cold, gold back alleys and paths that twist in narrow hexagons, Janus and Logan muse about their fool’s errand.

The two of them have already given up, as much as they can be said to do so while still continuing their half-hearted search. Janus, in fact, has already analysed the other Sides’ unspoken opinions on the matter, and come to the conclusion that the only two who truly, wholly believe that Thomas can be found and rescued are Roman and Remus.

“It’s understandable,” Logan comments, “that they would think such a thing. Roman has always been too stuck in his dreams to face reality.”

Janus nods. “And Remus only ever has a grasp on what ‘reality’ entails when it benefits him. Hey, excuse me! Have you seen a guy around our height? Looks like us, might not be dead? Oh, _eurgh_.”

He dodges out of the way of the shade he had been addressing. It topples over onto the pale ground. The hand it had extended to grasp onto Janus does not impede its fall, and it collapses: knees, hand, and then a crunch as its nose hits the floor.

“Disgusting,” he sniffs, as bees swarm down, crawling onto the ground and twisting the shade until it lies facing upwards. Another bee, smaller than the rest, crawls onto the shade’s face like a grotesque parody of an oxygen mask, and prises its mouth open.

Logan doesn’t bother to look any further at the act. Instead, he merely walks on by Janus’s side as the buildings thin and the world opens to a vast honeycomb desert.

The people here do not amble, unknowing and incapable of really ever knowing again – no, their fate is far crueller. The other Sides may have seen terrible things – things that may even make them think of the Hell that evolved out of Christianity’s desire for physical torture for sinners, rather than psychological. They may have seen hellish things, but Janus decides, as he looks at the shades who seem to inhabit every few square metre, that this is what Dante would have been inspired by.

Instead of drifting endlessly through identical streets, minds thickened with forgetfulness and honey, these shades seem to be shackled to their places by invisible chains. There are sparks of life still in some of their indistinguishable eyes, and some of them form words with their mouths, empty of honey. They beg; they plead for mercy.

It’s pointless. The two of them barely care to ask for directions, instead following a path where the crushed honeycomb seems to have almost become sand, and stepping stones pave the way through the tortured souls.

They turn right near a bone-thin man with dry skin and a croaking voice, who tells them, “Just down the way, in case you forgot.”

He reaches up to the single fig hanging from the tree he stands under. It is far too high for a man of his height, and there are no footholds low enough for one so frail to try climbing the tree.

A wasp lands on his bony, outstretched finger. Janus and Logan continue walking.

A man halfway up a very steep hill catches sight of them and waves, immediately losing his grip on the curled-up beetle he had been pushing, which rolls down and only stops a foot or so away from the path. As much as Logan would love the opportunity to study such a creature, and how it must have adapted in order to exist on such a scale, the man has already started lugging it back to the foot of the hill.

Another man, tied to a wheel and screaming as fireflies eat through his flesh, takes a moment to form words that might be, _“Just through the gates, now!”_ but were also just as likely to have been random noises of agony.

And then, as they always do, Logan and Janus reach the end of their path. They look up, almost in unison, at the wrought-iron fence that towers over them; a black monolith in the pale world around them.

“I suppose they got permission from Anish Kapoor, then,” says Janus, idly.

Logan blinks, shakes his head, and then squints at Janus in disbelief. “ _Why_ are you talking about _Vantablack_?”

Janus’s little capelet momentarily shifts up to his ears as he shrugs. “I was just wondering if Anish Kapoor will end up in the town or the desert, is all.”

“Forget Anish Kapoor!” Logan sighs, then reaches out to the half-open iron gate and pushes.

It makes exactly the sound that you would expect a large iron gate to make: it groans loudly, screeching lowly and with enough force to make the two Sides wince. Regardless, no matter how gracelessly, it has opened, and they step through.

The buzzing of bees, though still present, seems quieter – almost imperceptible, compared to the mechanical hum of the bees outside. The air is still, with the perfume of flowers hanging around them like summer heat in Florida. Red hippeastrums; lilac cyclamens; blue hyacinths. The colours are vivid; far from the dissociated paleness that had surrounded them all this time before. Janus breathes in through his nose, and the scent of magnolia and iris crashes into him with the nostalgia of someone’s old perfume.

All of this wonder at the greenery is crammed into half a moment, because, once the shock of colour fades enough from their minds to think, their eyes fix on a single thing.

His head is bowed; his face shaded from the bright light by a rainbow of chrysanthemums perched on his brow. His hands are folded loosely in his lap as he sits on the carved stone bench. Janus wonders, distantly, what must have happened to scuff the knees of his jeans. Janus should have known this, he thinks; Janus and Logan both, because this is the biggest part of them, or, rather, this is the whole that they life for. His features become clear in that moment of clarity, like putting on a pair of glasses in the morning, and it becomes evident that he is identical to Logan, and the human half of Janus’s face, and Roman, and Remus, and Patton and Virgil because _he’s Thomas_.

Janus laughs, releasing all the hope he’d been pointedly ignoring in an eruption of joy, as Logan screams, _“Thomas!”_ and begins to run towards the bench. In his enthusiasm, he stumbles, but catches himself before he can even really realise that he had been falling.

“L-Logan?” Thomas’s voice is stifled, as though he’s speaking through pneumatic lungs. “Janus?”

To finish the story here, now, as the two Sides embrace their Centre, would be kind. It would be the happy sort of open ending, where you avert your eyes from anything that could go wrong, and instead believe that they all lived – _‘lived’_ , here, being the operative word – happily ever after. Your mind is given the liberty to construct its own story, in which Thomas joins Janus in laughter born of joy that was thought to be gone, and Logan leads them to the other two groups, of Roman and Patton, and Remus and Virgil. In this story that you imagine, they leave the Underworld without a single problem, exchanging glances and quips the entire way through the tunnels, which seem a lot less vast and terrifying in the light of their singular, collective relief.

You could leave the story like that; as a surreal nightmare solved by simply waking up. It’s very sweet. Nice, neat, and satisfyingly hollow, like a chocolate Easter bunny.

Leave this story now, if you wish to believe that this hug sealed their happily-ever-after. Now; leave now.

For Thomas and his Sides had been doomed from the start, when a frightened rattlesnake bit down on the sock-covered gap between denim jeans and synthetic suede shoes; when Thomas fell to the ground, screaming and seizing and bleeding a little from where his hands caught the brambles; when they laid flowers on his still chest and a little cross made of twigs at his feet.

For Janus had kissed Thomas’s cheek, in the garden, in that haze of sheer euphoria that somehow, against all odds, something had gone _right_. Here was Thomas, in his arms, asking after all his other Sides now that he had two of them in his reach.

How greedy. That’s just one of the things that Janus loves about Thomas.

But Janus had kissed Thomas’s cheek, in the garden, surrounded by the heavy perfume of real, living flowers, and his lips had come away sticky. Instinctively, his tongue darts out, only to taste sweetness beyond anything he’d ever tasted before, like autumn and petrichor and the mustiness of backstage in old theatres. It dissolves on his tongue, blending in with his saliva until he has no choice to accept it.

And that’s a little bit of a hitch, you might think. And this could change everything, you might think; this could be a disaster.

And then he smiles like nothing is wrong, because nothing is wrong, past the obvious ‘being-in-the-Underworld’ business. Thomas is here, cognisant and speaking more and more clearly with every question he asks Logan, even as he doesn’t wait for an answer; even as he curls up further in their entangled arms, yet still does not derive any warmth from their contact.

“What happened to me?” he asks, hiccupping.

Logan and Janus make uneasy eye contact.

“You died,” says Logan.

Janus’s face tightens in stupid sheepishness. “Snakebite.”

Thomas huffs out something that’s half-laugh, half-sob. “I’m sorry.”

“What for?” Logan asks. “You didn’t knowingly provoke it. It was an accident.”

“But I should’ve been more aware of my surroundings.”

Logan tilts his head, considering the information. He starts to nod before Janus covers his mouth with a gloved finger.

“There’s no need to apologise for an accident,” he says. His voice feels richer than usual, with the power of his low bass notes threading through his usual speaking voice; a cat’s purr of vibrato. “We won’t let this happen again, Thomas.”

Logan (for reasons clear to anyone who knows what purpose the honey serves, and how it aids those who consume it) does not point out that, as death is a nigh-irreversible state of being, Thomas is unlikely to live to experience it again. He merely runs a hand through Thomas’s hair, dislodging some petals from his chrysanthemum crown. After a moment’s hesitation, Logan removes the crown, and places it on another part of the bench.

“And the other Sides, where are they?” asks Thomas.

“Somewhere around here,” Janus replies. “Shall we go find them?”

And he rises to his full height, extending a hand to Thomas, who takes it with a smile. Logan gingerly takes Thomas’s free hand, and, together, they leave the garden behind.

* * *

The six of them – seven, now, with Thomas – find themselves crossing paths, quite literally, near the start of the town. Thomas doesn’t stop smiling as Patton hugs him, or as Roman caresses his face, or as Remus punches him hard enough in the arm to leave a bruise. In fact, his smile doesn’t shift at all, except when he’s speaking.

He traces their names carefully when he says them, holding them in his mouth like he’s speaking around fine china figurines.

He says things like: “Patton, are you alright?”

And then Patton says, “Yeah, kiddo, just a little shaken. We met the owner of this place’s wife, Seph.”

“Oh, _Patton_. Was she scary, or cruel, or something?”

“Nah, she was… She was kind of nice, actually,” he replies. “As nice as people down here can be, I think. It’s just that, well, with her being nice, and being here, it means that she looks after the dead people.”

“There was a bar filled with all those shades!” Roman interrupts. “They were very benign, but I can tell why Patton might have become distressed. There’s something unsettling about them…”

“Really?” asks Thomas. “Logan, do you know why? Was I unsettling too?”

“I suppose that, with us existing simultaneously outside of and as a part of you, you may not have died fully, somehow,” says Logan. His hand reaches out, finding Thomas’s again and intertwining their fingers. “Of course, this is only a hypothesis. It might also be… No.”

Thomas squeezes his hand, brows drawing up in concern. “What do you mean?”

“I do not wish to upset any of you by saying it.”

“And not saying it is really so very helpful to us,” Janus retorts.

Logan glances away, at the shambling bodies that steer clear of their little conversational circle. “It might be that Thomas simply hasn’t been down here as long, and that he, too, will inevitably succumb to the same condition as the rest of the shades.”

There’s a long moment of silence as the Sides process this.

“Well,” says Thomas, eventually, “it doesn’t seem _that_ bad.”

Patton shakes his head. “You didn’t see them, Thomas. They stared into space, and all they did was drink honey. And the way their bodies felt when I had to touch them!” He shudders. “Some of them were still soft, and kind of limp, and that was bad in its own way, but others were… Moving their hands to get them to drink was like opening jars that you closed without remembering to wipe the Crofter’s off the rim.”

“That’d be the whole mellification process! Make them eat honey until it’s all they cry and puke and shit, and make a panacea out of what remains. _God_ , that steak was good.” Remus says, to six faces of blank confusion and one face of abject horror.

“Mellified…” Logan shakes his head slowly. “Mellified steak? But there’s no livestock down here, nothing but bees and-”

“Yeah, me and Virgil ate human meat,” he beams.

Virgil chokes on the air. “We fucking ate _what_?”

“The buzzy bitch is, like, at _least_ seventy-percent bee. She’s not gonna be carving up her kin for a little snack to give to strangers.” Remus shrugs. “And, anyway, there was _way_ too much honey in the meat for it to _not_ be the dead guys.”

“Wait.” Janus raises a single finger. “Remus, Virgil, you _ate the food down here_? That we were told – that we _know_ – to not consume, under any circumstances?”

“No shit, Sher-cocksucker!”

Shaking his head, Janus sighs at Virgil. “Remus I expected this from, but you, Virgil?”

“It didn’t feel like a choice,” he growls. “If you were in my place, you would’ve done the same.”

Janus snorts, but, just as he opens his mouth, Patton exclaims, “No fighting!”

“No fighting,” Thomas echoes. “Patton’s right. Janus, Virgil, we shouldn’t be arguing right now. I mean, uh, we’re kind of in… Bee Hell?”

“The Underworld,” says Logan. “That’s what it was listed as in the Yellow Pages.”

“Okay, we’re in the Underworld, and-”

“I preferred Bee Hell,” Remus pouts.

“Thank you for your contribution, Remus.” Thomas runs a hand through his hair. “We’re here, and it’s all pretty creepy, and I’d like to know what’s up with the whole ‘eating things’ thing.”

Due to the fact that stories do not exist in a vacuum, and also due to the very nature of the echoes of this story, with these names, Thomas should very well know what is ‘up’ with the whole ‘eating things’ thing. Honey; berries; steak; pie; they’re all the same, really. Hospitality is a sacred contract of peace, at its heart, and to break it is to besmirch one’s own honour. Still, all contracts come with fine print, and here’s what Remus and Virgil neglected to understand, and what Janus is blatantly ignoring: there is no endpoint to this hospitality. When the invitation was accepted – when the steak was eaten, or the cheek was kissed, or the man begged the bartender for something to make it all go away – the choice was made to remain here, in the home of Missus Hades and Seph, until the time came for them to leave.

And the time will never come for them to leave; not until their cumulative ghost is ready to seek a new river, and a new life, with no memories remaining. Dead is dead, after all, and there is no going back.

Of all the Sides, it is Roman who explains this. Roman, with his head in the clouds and his lips in a song and his nose in every story he could find worth in. When the others look at Logan, eyes begging, he simply shakes his head, then nods to Roman. He has no corrections to make.

“So, basically, what you mean is that we can’t leave now we’ve…” Virgil blanches, but continues, “Now we’ve eaten food from the Underworld.”

“Really?” Roman asks. “Is that all you’ve gathered from my genius?”

Virgil rolls his eyes. “Yes, Princey, I know you’re smart, but I’m paraphrasing the most important bit. Two of us have eaten food from here. That means we’re trapped, right?”

“Right! You’ve always been telling me to go to hell,” Remus grins, “so I guess you can’t be too upset about it!”

Thomas shakes his head. “Logan, Roman, can I ask you a question?”

“You just have, but yes. You can ask as many questions as you’d like, Thomas, and we’ll endeavour to answer them to the best of our abilities.” Logan adjusts his glasses, and Thomas’s vision seems to double; seeing a staircase over where cream cobbles had long-since set and eroded away to flat smoothness, and a sofa to his Side’s left-hand side, and a kitchen in the back, where they made food with fresh vegetables and a lot more joy than expected from a man who had been afraid of his own stove for much of his adult life.

Then he blinks, and it dissipates, like a drop of blood in a still, endless ocean.

“Does it count if you drink it?”

Nobody responds.

He shakes his head. “Sorry, that was a stupid question. I was just… I thought it might… But, no, I can’t leave. Not without Virgil and Remus.”

Roman bites his lip, and slips something from his pocket. A little stoppered bottle, about the length of his palm, filled with viscous, glistening, red honey.

“It counts if you drink it,” he answers.

Patton yelps. “You stole from Seph?”

In response, Roman just shrugs. “I thought this might happen.”

Something warm trickles down Thomas’s face. It’s faster, thinner, and warmer than honey, and it takes a moment for him to realise that it’s a tear. Then his chest is heavy, and he’s heaving out sobs, and, over and over, he says, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

On instinct, Patton presses Thomas’s face against his chest, his polo shirt absorbing his tears, while Janus rubs his shoulders, humming and hissing like it’ll drown out the sorrow.

“It hurt.”

Thomas hiccups; he coughs. Virgil reaches out to pat his back, firmly, to dislodge the misery in his chest.

“I remember it hurting. I remember the sting in my ankle, and the feeling of falling, and I landed here. Something… Something crawled on my face – looking back, it was-” He glances to the tiny gap between Roman and Remus’s shoulders, between which another poor shade was providing a bee with a snack. “-yeah. But I ran. I stopped hurting; I wasn’t scared. Guys, I was _alone_. For the first time, I couldn’t feel you. It was like there was a void, not just in my chest, or in my head, but everywhere. I was already hollowed out before a bee could touch me.”

And his Sides understood, at least a little, because an ache was growing in their bodies like a hole that couldn’t be filled, even with all the air in their lungs.

“He ran through the streets, poor dear,” a voice, familiar to Patton and Roman and Thomas, but not new to the others. Seph walks forwards, her velvet suit seeming to glow in the light, like sunshine on grass after a summer shower. “He came to my bar, pleading for something to fill in the gap. _‘Be patient,’_ I was telling him; _‘Be patient, they’re coming for you, just like they always will.’_ ‘Cept still, he kept on begging, getting down on his knees and crying. Crying as much as the dead can, anyhow.” She licks her lips, then swallows. “He’d lost his dreams, y’see, and that means he’d lost most himself. Died so quick he’d left his soul behind. Then, well, there’s just one thing I can do for the dead.”

“A sip, and the empty ache eased. A glass, and I was numb.” Roman takes Thomas’s hand, palm-to-palm, and laces their fingers together. He kisses the prominent knuckles of their middle fingers, and Thomas’s sob catches in his throat, turning into a chuckle.

Seph is not close enough to touch them. Logan is glad for this. Nobody from the Underworld should touch Thomas, lest something fantastical and horrifying happen. Like he could turn to honeycomb and scatter like sugar.

“I led him down the path,” she says. “I knew y’all’d find him there. It’s the prettiest place in this godforsaken hell, after all. Even the bees prefer it, really, if they can get past the fence.”

“Then why is it still there? Why not pull it down?” Patton asks. His chest trembles, still damp with Thomas’s cold tears. “Why let this keep happening?”

“We don’t have the time.”

Missus Hades looked to be huge to Virgil, when they were in her cramped little cabin. She’d seemed to tower over them, like a steel statue dressed in fine cottons and silk. Now, in the vast brightness of her endless town, her eyes seem dark with exhaustion, just like Virgil’s own. Still, she walks like a queen of stingers and stones, and whiskey-bitter sweetness, and circles around Thomas and his Sides.

“Once, a man came down here,” says Hades. “No-one noticed. No-one cared. What’s one more stiff? No-one cared, except himself. His own will to live; his heart; his selfishness; all that stuff that makes a man. He’d left it behind.”

“You’d left yourself behind, back then. You did, and so did I.” Seph reaches out as Hades draws closer to her, pressing a hand to her cheek. “We forgot the flowers, didn’t we?”

Hades moves her head slightly; kisses Seph’s palm. “We did.” She turns to address Thomas. “You’re really quite a remarkable man. All of you. Even back then, the first time, they came to find you, and they almost succeeded. The singer, your prince boy; he drank my honey, and he sang our petty disputes and miscommunications into peace. Boy, you sang until we could love again.”

“Your reward was freedom.”

“Not just a reward,” says Hades, lip curling. “A punishment, too. A trial.”

“You can’t look back,” Roman mumbles.

“And Thomas could not make a sound.” Seph sighs. “He did so well.”

Logan shakes his head. “You’re saying that this has all happened before.”

“Too often, if you’re asking me,” says Seph.

“I don’t believe any of this,” he huffs.

Pulling away from Patton’s chest and wiping his eyes, Thomas looks to Logan. He bites his tongue, licks his lip, swallows the lump in his throat down, then asks, “Don’t you remember?”

“I drank the whole bottle,” says Roman, looking at the honey he still holds. “It was like all the power was buzzing through my body, like I was shivering. When I tried to move, my mind wouldn’t send the messages to my legs. It was like the air was sticky and thick. It took me a while to realise that with every movement, I was turning to honey.”

“And I heard it happen. Like, I knew it’d happen. I know it’ll happen again. I ate the food, I tied myself here. At least I’m not gonna get arrested for cannibalism, you know? Not that I’d mind giving prison a shot.” Remus laughs bitterly. “Anyway, I looked back, saw Thomas and a puddle of honey instead of my brother, and whoosh! Tossed myself right off the cliffy bit we were on.”

Virgil shrugs. “I didn’t turn around. I don’t think I ever have.”

“Once or twice,” Seph murmurs, “when he’s made a sound.”

“I turned around, then. I don’t think I ever wanted to see that sight ever again, with his hoodie, soaking up the honey. Gosh, he _was_ the honey, wasn’t he?” Patton’s voice quivers as he speaks. The human heart wasn’t made to break so much; so often. “I made the most of it. I reassured Logan. I told Thomas I love him. I trusted Janus. And I guess I just… Splorted.”

“The problem with lying is that, for it to work, it has to be believable,” says Janus. “Otherwise, it must be what the listener wishes to hear. No matter how much I told myself that it wasn’t a trick or a trap, and that I could trust these gods who had, minutes before, been so furiously destructive, I did not believe myself.” His lips draw into a smirk. “On the other hand, as I told myself that the quickest glance couldn’t hurt; that I could just sneak a glimpse to check, and nobody had to know… Well, I hope I didn’t hurt you, Thomas, when it happened.”

“It didn’t.”

Janus’s lips relax into a genuine smile, but not a happy one. “Liar.”

“So now what?” Logan spreads his hands in a vague gesture towards all the Sides, and Thomas, and everything else. “We walk off and lose two out of six Sides, in the hopes that Thomas, as a human, won’t mellify as soon as he gets through the manhole cover?”

Then there’s a flash of movement; a blur of blue and grey and suddenly-snatched scarlet. The quiet _pop_ of a cork being prised out of a bottle, and a single gulp.

“Three out of six,” Patton says, licking the red from the bow of his lip.

Logan’s mouth moves soundlessly. Eventually, he begins to splutter, and the sound allows him to begin to form words. “Patton, what the _fuck_?”

“Language,” Patton mildly reprimands.

“I reiterate; what the fuck? We could’ve made do without Remus and Virgil, in a worst-case scenario, which this clearly is.” He pauses. “No offence meant, Virgil.”

In response, Virgil grimaces, and wiggles his hand a little bit to indicate that, despite Logan’s intentions, some offence was definitely taken from the statement.

“In a worst-case scenario, Janus could have taken over some of the roles of Anxiety, until a new Side could form. It would be difficult, yes, and Thomas would likely never be completely the same, but it would’ve been worth it for him to live his life.” Logan’s arms move wildly as he gestures; no longer the constrained, professional side he’d prided himself on being. “And what you choose to do instead of putting Thomas first is to… To further condemn him?”

Patton shrugs. His eyes are watering, a little. “I’m not leaving Virgil or Remus.”

“Yay,” Remus intones. “I’ve been acknowledged!”

“And, in regards to the possibility of me taking over Virgil’s role…” Janus touches his lips.

Thomas, who was watching, wipes his cheek with his fingers, and licks at the sticky residue that accumulates on them. His face falls.

“Oh, Janus,” he murmurs.

Logan shakes his head. “Right. No Janus. Nothing but Logic and filtered Creativity. Roman, we can make it, right?”

Roman blinks. “What? What do you mean?”

Logan squares his shoulders. “You, and me, and Thomas. We can get him through this together. He still has dreams. You still have dreams, don’t you, Roman?”

“Uh, well, yes, but-”

“We need to achieve those dreams,” says Logan. He runs a hand through his hair. “That’s all we _can_ do. That’s what Thomas has dedicated his life to doing; we can’t leave it unfinished like this!”

“But I’m not alive; not anymore.”

Thomas’s voice is quiet. Even the bees seem to have stopped buzzing, so that he might speak.

“All stories end, Logan,” Roman adds, reaching out a hand to Patton, who takes a moment to realise that he should pass the bottle of honey, which is once again stoppered in order to prevent any unfortunate sticky spillages. “Sure, it could’ve been better; it could’ve been a happy end, or at least a heroic one. But it’s ended.”

And he takes a small sip of honey.

Logan howls, and he doesn’t know if it’s in rage or sorrow or the crushing weight of being so out of his depth in a situation and thus failing his only real purpose (that being, of course, to aid Thomas in any way that he can).

But then arms wrap around him, kind and strong and _whole_ , in a way that means it can only be Thomas. His glasses are squashed between his face and Thomas’s floral shirt, but, being a figment of a vast imagination, it doesn’t really matter. The only thing that is truly real, here, is a fragment of a soul, being held by the one it belongs to.

And that is enough for Logan to let go of his tightly-reined sense of self and allow himself to cry.

“Oh,” Patton murmurs, “I don’t think that’s ever happened before.”

Remus says, “It might’ve done. Who knows?”

Crying is a bodily function like any other. Food leaves your body once you’ve absorbed the nutrients. Air leaves your lungs when you’ve got the oxygen from it. Tears leave your eyes when you cannot hold onto the burden for any longer; when you need to release all the stubborn emotions you’ve stifled and smothered, and reset to a mind that can think, and a heart that has loved.

Logan has spent a long time denying himself this. In fact, he spent so long denying his emotions that he died before he could feel them without the shadow of shame and guilt hanging over him for doing something so simple and natural. Even when he straightens and adjusts his glasses, still with red-rimmed eyes, Thomas does not let go of him. Instead, he merely squeezes his hand.

“Um, Missus Hades?” he says. “Seph?”

Seph smiles. “What is it you need, Thomas?”

He rubs his chin; adjusts his hair; all the things that he does to fill the silence between deciding to speak and deciding the words. Patton rests a hand on his shoulder. Virgil elbows him as gently as possible.

“I was wondering if we could… You know…”

Missus Hades, had she an eyebrow, would be raising it at that. “Speak, boy.”

“I’d like to take up gardening,” he blurts. “If you’d let me, of course.”

“Gardening, housekeeping…” Janus groans. “Call it what it is. You’re asking to look after that big old house that nobody’s using.”

Seph’s eyes widen, and even Missus Hades looks a little taken aback.

“It’s just-” Patton steps forwards, pressing his fingertips together. “It’s just that, well, you don’t have the time to pull the fence down. I guess it’s busy work, dealing with all the bees, and the dead people, and it’s all gotten a little tangled and now it’s messed up.”

Seph snorts. “You can say that again.”

With an uncertain grin, Patton says, “It’s messed up.”

Seph bursts into chortling laughter, and Missus Hades cracks a smile.

“Well, we’d leave the gate up,” Roman says. “It’s very grand-looking. Maybe install a bee-flap, for the bees? In case they want to crawl in rather than fly around it?”

Remus joins in on the laughter, screeching, “ _Bee flap_!”

“And, ooh, what if there was a hedge maze?” Roman claps his hands together, almost dropping the bottle of honey. “And it could flower during the springtime?”

And, even with so few words, the two goddesses could already see the possible future: a garden buzzing with bees; with life amongst the dead – for that is the only way for life to truly thrive, in the end. The thirty-year-old boys who’ve spent hours moving between worlds, even as years pass, because love lives outside of the illusory barricades of time; a bit of life where they don’t have to worry about the comings-and-goings of the very determined dreams of one dead man, and a life where all that they had dreamed of, back when honey was gold if it wasn’t scarce, would come to pass. Two women, waltzing in a perfect garden, while the dead dreamed until they came true.

“I have to leave, in the spring,” Seph hums. “It’d be nice, if I could leave a bit more of life down here for you.”

Hades smiles. “Dearest, you leave a part of yourself in my heart.”

“And you in mine.”

Softly, Remus snorts. “Bee flap.”

“If we’re staying down here, we’d better get to stay in the mansion,” Janus mutters to Thomas.

Virgil doesn’t elbow him as gently. “Not the _time_ to be a self-serving creep.”

Janus shifts, and his nose wrinkles, but he doesn’t say anything else.

“Actually, d’you think it’d be that bad, letting them stay in the house first?” Seph asks Hades, who genuinely looks thoughtful.

“They’ll be gone soon enough, anyway,” she says, which, from her, is enthusiastic agreement. “They can clean it up for us; save us the trouble.”

And that’s how this story ends, essentially. Six Sides and their Centre, following two goddesses through the Underworld. A little spark of life in a dead man’s existence, and a little bit of forever spent rummaging through soil, clipping dead flower heads for the compost (when Remus doesn’t steal them for a quick snack) and planting new seeds further and further out into the desert.

It’s not a satisfactory end. The task they set out to achieve goes forgotten, in favour of an irrelevant side-gig as a housekeeper fleet. It’s not even a happy end, either. The dead fade. They rot and fall apart without being able to do a single thing to stop it. Thomas faces the pain better than the other shades, but, then again, the other shades don’t stick around for as long; not when the River Lethe flows freely to water the growing garden, and life is only an impulse away.

On the worst days, his Sides will take him to the garden, to quietly sit on a bench, and to watch the bees crawl over the flowers, and just to simply rest. Sometimes, it feels like the real sun is shining down on them, warming their skin.

They are wrong to believe so. They haven’t felt the sun in a very long time, and have thus forgotten it.

Maybe one day, Thomas forgets, and the Sides fade away, only to be reborn in the same soul once more. Maybe they have the same names. Hopefully, they don’t, but hope is what leads to tragedies.

Then again, hope is also what joy is built on. Hope is the thing which makes you search in the strangest places, and makes you walk with the worst burden on your back, and hope is what leads you to keep going, even when it doesn’t make sense to. Hope is what led to the happy middle. Doubt might make you turn around, but hope is the reason we sing again.

So maybe they live a different life. Maybe they go back, once more, to a gate that doesn’t squeak and a pair watching a couple waltz amongst the flowers. Maybe they go back a hundred times more, and maybe that’s already happened. After all, just because it’s a thrice-told story doesn’t mean that the fourth telling has no meaning. Just because it happens again doesn’t mean it’ll end the same way.

And, well, in the end, no matter how foolish; no matter how tragic – it’s worth it, isn’t it?

* * *

“Try this,” Seph politely suggests, slamming down a bottle of golden liquid onto the dining room table.

“Oh, _please_ spill it everywhere,” says Janus. “There’s really nothing I’d rather do than polish the table for the third time today.”

Seph chuckles. “Well, if you’d be as polite as to bring us down some glasses, I’ll be kind enough to keep my hand from slipping. The missus’d have my head if I wasted this, anyhow.

“Your glasses are here, my lady!” Roman announces, presenting Seph with a single wine glass and placing the other on the table.

“Oh, Roman, you shouldn’t have.” Janus’s mouth curls into a saccharine smile, but his eyes are hard enough to cut rock.

“Prince Ponce,” mutters Virgil, carrying five more glasses by holding the stems between his fingers, two in each upturned hand and one squished between the sides of his palms. They all clink together in a particularly unmusical way. “Stupid Snake, too. Got the rest, Seph,” he says, and places them on the table.

“You’re a gem,” Seph says, having already filled the two glasses, and swiftly moving onto the new ones.

Remus returns to the dining room, stretching like a sphinx and using his hands and toes to walk around like a sea lion. “Tom-bone and the butt-stick crew are on their way! He’s having another oblivion day.”

“Not much we can do regarding that, poor boy,” muses Seph. “Unless you want to bring another glass in?”

“I’d appreciate it,” Thomas sighs, as Patton and Logan drag him through the doorway and onto one of the nicer dining chairs.

“What do you have this time, Auntie?” Patton asks genially, as Janus runs to fetch another glass from the kitchen. “Winter sunlight? Finding your favourite book from when you were ten and curling up under the blankets and rereading it? Walking barefoot in grass?”

Seph shakes her head, but she’s smiling. “Nah, nothing as special as that. Just honey.”

She wiggles the bottle and pours the rest into the glass Janus holds out to her. She holds it steady as the last of it dribbles out like a rippling golden thread.

Logan raises an eyebrow as he picks up a glass from the table. “But the honey here is red. This isn’t. Did you get it while you were gone?”

“Nah. This is hundred-percent pure Underground honey, boys.” She raises a glass, gesturing for everyone else to take one and join her. “Made from hundred-percent, goddamn-betcha-ass-they’re-pure Underground flowers.”

And, together, they drink their ambrosia. And when they sing, their voices reach lower than the deepest hive, and soar more beautifully than the birds Seph saw when she last went above; and when they dance, they move in stomping circles to polyrhythms that have never made more sense; and for all that time they have before the honey-dreams fade, they experience a euphoria far greater than the joys they feel on most days.

Do you see? Sometimes, things end in the same way, but there’s still always something changed, even just the tiniest bit. Sometimes, that is all the difference you need to try again. Sometimes, that’s all you need to understand; that, one day, one final time, they might live happily ever after.

**Author's Note:**

> they're not ooc it's a time loop /hj
> 
> okay, so it's not even a time loop. this was just a metafictional half-experiment in omniscient narrator, half-homage to melliferous and its remixes and min herself, who is an absolute delight. it's an honour to work with her, when i get the chance
> 
> i have been [@lifewithoutrainydays](https://lifewithoutrainydays.tumblr.com/) and this was 'come my way and stay'


End file.
